Importing DVCPRO

[John Rofrano]

[John Sieber] “… is it the mxf files that Vegas 12 will read?”

Yup. never, ever, never accept anything that was captured on a Mac. Always request the raw camera files if you’re working on a PC because the Mac will shoe-horn them into QuickTime and chances are your PC won’t know how to read them.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Osbun]

I’m guessing the “1280 x 1080” in the e-mail you received is just a typo.

Dave

[Pat Keough]

1280×1080 is correct if they were shooting 1080 60i mode on the P2 cam. DVCPro footage is not full raster.

The .mxf extention from P2 cards is used for both the video and audio files. The location in the directory structure on the P2 card tells the NLE if it is video or audio. Fun huh? What you need to do is ask that they send you the entire directory structure from the P2 cards. Then you have to “Mount” them by putting the directory structure on a usb hard drive and using the device explorer in Vegas Pro 12 to import them. AT least that’s about the only way I know when you don’t have the hardware sitting in front of you but I have only been using P2 with Vegas since 12 came out and not often at that.

Of course, you could also require that the main office just transcode everything to ProRes 422 and send that to you. The quality loss should be negligable if they know what they are doing.

Vegas shoudl have no trouble with ProRes 422 as long as you have quicktime installed and up to date on your PC. I have not yet had trouble opening any .mov files spit out from the Mac here. Once again though, I try not to have to so it’s not often.

[John Rofrano]

[Pat Keough] “Vegas shoudl have no trouble with ProRes 422 as long as you have quicktime installed and up to date on your PC. I have not yet had trouble opening any .mov files spit out from the Mac here. “

Yea, I should qualify my statement a bit. You will only have problems when the Mac places a camera’s native format in a MOV file. You will not have problems if it converts the native format to ProRess 422. So that’s a more complete answer: either get the original camera files, or a ProPres QuickTime file, but never accept the native camera format re-wrapper in QuickTime because Vegas Pro is not expecting to see native formats in a QuickTime container.

Thanks Pat for pointing that out.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Sieber]

Thanks guys! Cleared things up quite a bit. I believe I will have them ship me the ProRes 422 output files rather than the raw directory structure from the P2 cards – we don’t need their entire footage, so though it will mean a little more time involved for them to convert the select clips we need, it beats having to manage the DVCPro issues. Of course, I still need to deal with the Mac formatted drive issues (been using MacDrive). How are you guys dealing with PC/Mac drive formatting issues?

Thanks
John

[Mike Kujbida]

Stick with MacDrive. I deal with post houses that use FCP and that tool has paid for itself many times over!!

[John Rofrano]

[John Sieber] “How are you guys dealing with PC/Mac drive formatting issues?”

I use Paragon HFS+ for Windows.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Marcus Van bavel]

Raylight Decoder will allow you to import DVCPROHD quicktimes
to Vegas, see https://dvfilm.com/raylight/decoder